Managing to Stay Whole
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Managing to Stay Whole Washington By Meg Greenfield Public Affairs. 256 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Steven V. Roberts Syndicated columnist; media and public affairs professor, George...
...Then there is the personal cost of life in Washington...
...There was some sort of lone fortress there into which one did not intrude," writes Graham, who employed Greenfield on the Post's editorial page for more than 30 years...
...Some of my colleagues went way over the line, offering back-channel advice to public figures and even writing some of their speeches...
...Newsrooms reek with cynicism about the very notion of public service...
...When Tip O'Neill, a doctrinaire New Dealer, was House Speaker, one of his best friends was the Republican leader, Bob Michel, a conservative from Peoria, Illinois...
...At one time capital reporters and their sources were probably too cozy...
...Meg, always a fierce editor, would say it rambles too much and lacks a coherent theme...
...We treat them like bastards, not buddies...
...Their neighbors in suburban Washington, Ab and Sylvia Herman, were huge Republicans, but both couples understood that respect and, yes, affection across the aisle were essential to the smooth functioning of democratic institutions...
...They drank together, played golf together, knew each other's wives and families...
...Our readers never would have gotten that jump if I had not spent many hours getting to know Quayle and convincing him I would play fair...
...Still, Washington contains many nuggets of humor and insight about the city Greenfield came to in the fall of 1961...
...While Greenfield says their personal closeness has been exaggerated, she admits she "liked Nancy" and learned a great deal from the First Lady about "the machinations and the tensions of her husband's White House...
...Actually, it is a series of sketches and ruminations stitched together by historian Michael Beschloss from material Greenfield worked on secretly and then left behind at her death two years ago...
...She also knew that there is only one healthy answer to the question, "How much is enough...
...When I first came here, just three years after Greenfield, journalists regularly palled around with the people they covered— and covered up for them...
...There are times.' Greenfield says, "when they will level with you and provide an insight (not always or necessarily flattering to them) that you did not have and could not have gotten in formal questioning of a stranger...
...I didn't agree with most of their views, but as the Capitol Hill reporter for the New York Times, it was critical for me to understand them and gain their confidence...
...Many of his foot soldiers consequently refused to move their families here, with disastrous results...
...Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction...
...For one thing, personal connections between press people and politicians can be enormously useful...
...The same was true for my in-laws, Hale and Lindy Boggs, dedicated Democrats who represented New Orleans in the House for a combined total of almost 50 years...
...She isn't the first journalist, used to producing bite-sized portions, who had trouble planning and cooking a whole meal...
...She did know that those who "manage to stay whole" fill their days with flowers, friends and family...
...We spent more than an hour discussing George Bush's probable Vice Presidential nominee, and I came away convinced the guy had a good shot.Thatledtoastory in the Times naming Quayle as a likely choice—way ahead of our competition...
...Washington is, after all, a place where you can sit next to the Speaker of the House at the local church (my wife did that often when the late Massachusetts Democrat Tip O'Neill was a regular at Little Flower parish...
...But she did have good friends and colleagues, "the family you create," as she put it, and family life is really the key to staying whole and sane in a city that calculates value in terms of minutes on the tube...
...But even if she remains a "mysterious figure," Meg Greenfield did know that appearing on Larry King is not necessarily a sign of virtue or a source of joy...
...They took greater risks, and were more effective, than Meg's old liberal allies from New York...
...Although their friendship was slow to heal, she continued to see the value of such personal connections: "I think the quality of journalistic output would not be compromised or endangered by a little more shoulder-rubbing with the objects of our reporting...
...Not only did marriages break up, but the gulf between the parties widened...
...One day in early 1981 I was trying to track down a copy of President Ronald Reagan's budget proposal that had been given to Republican members of the House Budget Committee...
...In Greenfield's view, too many follow the adage, "I've been on Larry King, therefore I am," and too few "manage to stay whole" and nurture "their own better nature...
...During the mid-'60s she discovered, much to her surprise, that the real heroes in the civil rights debate were Middle Western Republicans like Representative William McCulloch of Ohio and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois...
...Personal relationships are also a way to counteract the biases and stereotypes that infect even the most balanced journalists...
...Many denizens of the capital "almost eagerly dehumanize themselves," confusing well-tended images with real emotions and appearances with reality...
...Then a young correspondent for the old Reporter magazine, she longed to be a novelist and considered her absence from New York's Greenwich Village a temporary exile...
...This led us to formulate a question we periodically ask ourselves: "How much is enough...
...That's easy to say, hard to carry out in practice, but Greenfield followed a similar guideline...
...That answer is, "Whatever I have...
...The question, as Greenfield notes, is how these relationships are handled, how the journalist maintains them yet avoids the "pitfalls and temptations" they present...
...When Newt Gingrich led the Republican insurgency that captured the House in 1994, part of his core doctrine was disdain for Congress and the whole city of Washington—which he saw as a sort of Sodom-on-the-Potomac that would infect young ideologues with that dread disease, malarial moderation...
...One of my best sources on Capitol Hill was a Republican staffer whose son took piano lessons from the same teacher as my daughter...
...Here was the chief editorialist of the Post, command central for the Liberal Establishment, talking regularly to a woman who was often ribbed and sometimes reviled by right-thinking Lefties...
...Someone else is always going to be richer, more famous, better looking—and get more time on TV Washington is full of people who are essentially addicted to public notoriety...
...Today the Hermans' daughter, Joanne Emerson, is a Republican Congresswoman from Missouri...
...And Greenfield has written a rather mysterious book...
...Sunday afternoons spent listening to the youthful plunkings of our children created a bond that bridged professional differences...
...Or you can stand next to the Secretary of the Treasury as you both root for your kids' soccer team (my brother's Saturday routine last fall...
...Greenfield thinks this "effigy journalism' is a mistake and I agree with her...
...On the contrary, it might be improved...
...She wound up writing an editorial savaging her good friend, Republican Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, after he Red-baited CNN correspondent Peter Amett during the Gulf War...
...My wife was once interviewed by a famous TV personality who demanded that the whole thing be redone because she had talked perhaps 20 seconds too long...
...For them, the answer to our question is, "It's never enough," often because there is nothing else in their lives that gives them much lasting gratification...
...The lack of "shoulder-rubbing" is even more serious between politicians of different stripes...
...When I looked at the list I realized to my horror that I did not know a single Republican on the committee...
...Personal foibles, from women to whiskey, seldom received the publicity they do today...
...One of my new sources was a feisty Congressman from Indiana named Dan Quayle...
...Friendships like the one between the Boggs and Herman families practically disappeared, and so did a sense of civility and common purpose...
...In my own case, I have followed a simple rule: Never get so close to a public figure that you are tempted to pull a punch...
...former White House correspondent, New York "Times" Katharine Graham, longtime publisher of the Washington Post, describes her friend Meg Greenfield as a "mysterious figure" who was "guarded and private" in her personal life...
...Or you can run into a former National Security Adviser at the grocery store (two of them, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Brent Scowcroft, frequent our Safeway...
...Meg never married, and as Kay Graham notes, she "did not seem to have many romances in her life," so the role of blood relatives is minimized in this account...
...A bigger surprise was Greenfield's friendship with Nancy Reagan...
...Her most intriguing sections focus on human relationships in the capital, both professional and personal—even though a final chapter on the author's own life was never finished...
...To most reporters, politicians are the enemy...
...This helped lubricate life on Capitol Hill, but it also reflected the mutual regard they shared for the institution of Congress...
...Greenfield, a self-described "Adlai Stevenson Democrat," had many similar experiences...
...I vowed to change that, and deliberately set about establishing ties to many young conservatives...
...She did know the danger of reaching a point where "you don't see the flowers and, more important, you don't see the people...
...media and public affairs professor, George Washington University...
...During the summer of 1988, just before the Republican National Convention, I ran into Quayle, by then a Senator, and walked with him to his office...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
